I shared a video about the ontological argument that gives the absolute bare-bones of the argument on my Facebook recently. A friend came along and raised a point that that friend said had bothered them for a while. The objection was that could not such an argument be used to argue for the existence of an evil god just as much as for a good God? I typed up a response I would like to also share here.
The first thing I’d point out is that such an objection to the argument assumes that evil is itself ontologically extant rather than a deprivation. That is, it assumes evil is itself a thing, rather than being that which is not-good. Although that is not an implausible position, it would take establishment of evil as a real existing thing in order for the argument to work.
Another difficulty is that it seems intuitively false that maximal greatness could include “maximal evil.” That’s a reason things like the maximally great pizza don’t really work as objections to the argument–maximally great pizzas are not only nonsensical (for greatness of pizza depends upon one’s taste) but they also have nothing intrinsic in them to entail maximal greatness. Such an objection would have to establish not only that evil exist on its own rather than as a deprivation, but also that evil is a kind of “great-making property.” Since it seems clear that evil is not a “great-making property,” the burden of proof is on any who wishes to demonstrate that it is.
A third problem is that the argument must see maximally good and maximally evil as epistemically on par with each other. For the argument to work, evil and good have to be effectively even when it comes to probability. But that is a very complex argument to make.
Finally, if all of these difficulties were overcome, the one making the argument has effectively made an argument for radical skepticism, to the point that we could not really be epistemically sure of anything. I’ve argued for this last point at length. Basically, the point is that if it is true that if A and B are epistemically on par with each other, we have no way of distinguishing between A and B, then it follows that we cannot be sure of anything or making distinctions in everyday life. For it is the case that we can construct for ANY scenario X a scenario Y that is epistemically on par with it (at least in principle) such that Y _may_ be the case instead. And if that’s true, and the point made by the notion of an evil God is true, then we must adhere to radical skepticism. In other words, a reductio ad abusdum defeats the argument.
J.W. Wartick - Reconstructing Faith 
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Posted by Vincent S Artale Jr | February 27, 2017, 7:37 AMI think a bigger problem here is the Euthyphro dilemma. You are aguing about proof of an evil deity, from the understanding of good and evil of a follower of a good God. True followers of an evil deity wouldn’t gloat malevolently of how fiendishly evil they were #Bwahahaha. They would think of the evil philosophy of their wicked religion as the ultimate ‘good’. A bit like right wing Christians whose morality is based on Ayn Rand.
Posted by dconneely2012 | February 27, 2017, 8:05 AMHave you ever considered that you might have simply mischaracterised the nature of the Creator?
God exists. Evil (defined as the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced) not only exists, but its capacity, variety and potency is increasing as God’s Creation faithfully fulfils its elemental instruction: to diversify and specialise, to migrate, to augment and to grow more complex over time.
This world is a complexity machine. That is an established and irrefutable fact. Hydrogen fuses into the heavier and more complex helium, helium fuses into the heavier and more complex carbon, helium and carbon combine to make the heavier and more complex oxygen. Single atoms come together to form simple compounds, simple compounds bind to produce double compounds, double compounds bond to fashion simple molecules, molecules marry to create amino acids, amino acids coalesce to model catalysing proteins and enzymes, and proteins and enzymes experiment to prototype self-replicating systems where, according to the accepted paradigm of evolutionary biology, there is a continuum from simple to more complex organisms.
Creation answers to but one basal command, knows but one timeless commission: to persist and grow more complex over time, and as it tumbles forward, gathering content, so too does the amount and variety of evil present in the world.
That being so, we must consider William Paley’s remarkablt astute observation: “Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
If the predominant tendency of the contrivance is towards greater evil, then to propose that this world is overseen by a good Creator is historically preposterous.
The conclusion awaiting the honest observer is that a species of evil is responsible for this world. And if one can imagine such a being—a being with whom no worse can be conceived—in one possible universe, then that being’s existence cannot be intelligibly denied in all possible universes. The conclusion follows:
1. It is possible that a maximally wicked being exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally wicked being exists, then a maximally wicked being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally wicked being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally wicked being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally wicked being exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally wicked being exists.
7. Therefore, the Omnimalevolent Creator exists.
Posted by john zande | July 2, 2017, 9:07 PMThe argument as is written is the same type of argument I’ve dealt with regarding the ‘evil god challenge.’ It yields radical skepticism. Moreover, other difficulties for your argument include making evil something with its own existence rather than a privation (something you must establish), as well as the fact it seems scientifically incorrect. Regarding the latter point, you write, “This world is a complexity machine.” Actually, the second law of thermodynamics suggests the opposite is true, for if that law is true (and it certainly seems to be), then the world is, without outside influence, a complexity deteriorator, not generator. Given that almost the entirety of your positive case centers around this scientifically implausible point, along with the other issues, I think it may be considered satisfactorily refuted.
Posted by J.W. Wartick | July 2, 2017, 10:13 PMIndeed, thinking about this for a moment longer, I find that your comment regarding complexity and evil is even more telling. As I noted, you’re entirely wrong regarding the state of the world as a “complexity machine,” for the second law of thermodynamics in fact means entropy, not complexity, is increasing. Now, I also noted that this is without outside influence. That means, in fact, that because we observe the second law of thermodynamics as true (i.e. it is not, so far as we can tell, actively being restrained by outside power), your argument proves the opposite of what you’d like. For given our observations of the universe, a good God would have something like increasing entropy in order to mitigate evil. I’m making this point on your premises, not saying I affirm them.
So your argument is even more fatally flawed than I initially pointed out.
Posted by J.W. Wartick | July 2, 2017, 10:18 PMHi J
Evil is not the privation of good. Good is not the privation of evil. Evil is not a thing, rather the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced.
I’m baffled as to your objection to this world being a complexity machine. You are, quite literally, denying 13.82 billion years of historical data.
What you must remember is that this world is finite. It is an artificial scape (a petri dish, if you like) sealed between the three things an aseitic being could never experience, but could impose on an artificial: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ultimately, the energy in the system will not be sufficient to create greater complexity, and at that time, this timed “game” will indeed end. For now, the energy is more than enough for the machine to perform, producing increasing orders of complexity.
Said most economically by philosopher and Evolutionary Biologist, Kelly Smith, this world, the universe, Creation, is a complexity machine:
I’m also a little baffled by your objection to complexity being synonymous with suffering.
By simple but persuasive design the old and the ordinary yield to the new and the exciting, and with the new comes more energetic and capable families of physiological, emotional, psychological and, more recently, economic and technological pain. Indeed, for organisms whose fitness depends only on their own sequence information, physical complexity (be it genetic, behavioural, cultural, technological or economic) must always increase, and as it does so too does that organism’s exposure to an ever more potent ecology of potential suffering; both real and, with the appropriate neurological capacity, imagined in a million busy little paranoias.
Suffering (a negative emotional state which derives from adverse physical, physiological and psychological circumstances) is built into the very nature of all things. It is immediate, it is inescapable, and it is everywhere. It is growing, and it is growing without interruption or meaningful regress. It is not however some emergent, ultramodern phenomena there to be experienced only by those organisms who have reached a level of biological sophistication which an inattentive human mind might equate with sentience. The truth is far more offensive. Although not cognitively aware of the sensation of pain, plants (from 3.5 billion years old algae to angiosperms) not only experience suffering in the form of chemical panic felt by the entire organism via electrical impulses transmitted across the plasmodesmata, but it is now known that they live in fear of their ferociously peculiar understanding of pain.
Located deep inside the plant genome, isolated within the first intron MPK4, lay three ancient genes (PR1, PR2, PR5) that have revealed to researchers that MPK4 is devoted to negative regulation of the PR gene expression. This gene expression is anticipatory. It is expectant. It is preparatory. It is suspicious. It is, in a word, fearful. If translated to the human experience, the PR gene expression is what a human observer would identify with as a deep-rooted, physiologically hardwired anxiety; a most ancient paranoia. It is a neurosis that rages against the night, against annihilation, and it is upon this antediluvian bedrock of fear and apprehension which all terrestrial life is raised; a gentle but persuasive insanity that has been replicated and expanded upon through increasing orders of biological complexity.
Albeit monstrous on such an elemental scale, the paranoia that aggravates and stirs and twists and bends algae is but an antique abstraction to a 1.5 billion years old protozoa which, despite not possessing a single neuron, is endowed with enough material complexity to resist and fight back against all assaults launched against its existence. To all who care to look, this animated behaviour to a menacing world demonstrates that this gelatinous blob of sensible organic material knows it is suffering. If it did not know this, if it was not acutely aware of the danger in real-time, the protozoa would not, after all, react and defend itself with equal, or ideally greater violence.
And up through the evolutionary paradigm the pattern to complexity (being synonymous with evil; with suffering) repeats with a ruthless efficiency.
A 550 million years old, 302 neuron-equipped roundworm’s capacity to experience suffering might be strikingly more complex to the protozoa’s, yet its scope to interact with pain (both real and imagined) is little more than a faint whisper to the genuine fear known to a 400 million years old, 250,000 neuron-endowed fruit fly. And while the remarkable 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness firmly asserts that the fly is keenly aware of pain (and all the emotional abstractions associated to it) it could never possibly comprehend the host of complex miseries, disastrous diseases, generous phobias and predatory threats available to the 210 million years old short-tailed shrew whose every lively moment is molested by an unending maelstrom of aposematic-triggered fear. Beyond that perpetual storm raging inside its 52 million neuron-equipped mammalian brain (roughly 10% of its body mass), the shrew is assembled around an amalgam of wet, energy-hungry, forever decaying organs and systems including a central nervous system (prone to diseases from arachnoid cysts to encephalitis), a circulatory system (disposed to diseases from haemophilia to cardiomyopathy), pulmonary and respiratory systems (liable to diseases from embolism to bronchitis), a digestive system (given over to diseases from diverticulitis to cirrhosis), an endocrine system (subject to diseases from osteoporosis to adrenal cancer), an immune system (susceptible to diseases from discoid lupus to ulcers), and a lymphatic systems (menaced by diseases from cancerous lymphoma to lymphangitis).
In its turn, however, the shrew could never grasp even the outer reaches of the torment and torture and pains and threats and diseases and fears there to be physically and emotionally experienced by a single 200,000 years old, 100 billion neuron-equipped human being.
Without any historical ambiguity or hint of equivocation, it is clear to all who look that evil is not an aberration. It is not a blister. The world has not gone spectacularly wrong. The evil which is amplifying through Creation is there for a purpose, and if it is there for a purpose, there by design, growing, then that evil exists because the architect of this world wants it to exist. And if the architect wants it to exist then that architect must not only draw some manner of critical pleasure from its existence, but more importantly, craves its augmentation over time.
That is what history informs us of, which is why I drew your attention to Paley’s observation: “Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
The predominant tendency of the contrivance does not lie. The pattern to complexity, and complexity to greater evil, is historical. It is quantifiable and it is predictable.
With this being a simple, hard fact, by no possible definition could a being responsible for this world be called good. By no possible definition could such a being be even called scrupulously indifferent, aloof, or staggeringly apathetic. The natural tendency of Creation to move always towards increasing orders of evil precludes both possibilities, and if that being cannot be called good (or at the very least meticulously disinterested) then what remains by way of an explanation for this world must be some flavour of unrestricted malignancy.
The alternative thesis—that God is maximally good but thoroughly incompetent and has lost total control of his creation—is a proposition simply too fantastic to entertain for any period longer than the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea. God, by definition, is maximally competent. God, by definition, is maximally efficient. There are no mistakes. There can be no mistakes, no missteps, no lapses or miscalculations. What exists, exists because it was arranged for by the Catalogue of Catalogues that is the mind of God. Evil exists because it is meant to exist, and to even suggest it is the result of some personal ineptitude or imbecilic blunder in the design is athletically—historically—preposterous.
This is the corporeality of this world, and from that mark it takes no more intellectual effort than that exercised in choosing a pair of socks to understand that St. Thomas Aquinas was emphatically, hopelessly wrong. It was not goodness that spilled out into the world, shaping that which had no shape, bonum diffusivum sui, but a spectacular weave of perversion born of a simple but ultimately irresistible compulsion to explore and experience through evolving proxies that single thing an uncreated aseitic being—God—could never alone explore or ever directly experience: death, and all the exotic abstractions associated to it.
This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is the stuff of all nightmares, a living daymare, a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness, and is it therefore any surprise that a child’s first reaction upon discovering themselves alive inside it is to scream in absolute horror?
Surely, if this world were good first feeling would be happiness, not distress. If this world were good, if it had been crafted by a maximally powerful artisan eternally mindful of the prosperity and joy of all things for which he alone is ultimately responsible, then a child’s first reaction would be to giggle and to laugh, to celebrate, to dance and to greet this treasure with a resounding exaltation of liberated cheer, not panic and utter dread. Indeed, if entering this existence was something to be deeply pleased about then maternity wards across the planet would reverberate with the elated sounds of spontaneous and uninhibited delight, not the bleached-white shrieks of terror as newborns found themselves awake, aware and trapped in a world hopelessly given over to the production of complexity, and through that impulse, the making of ever-deeper expressions of public and private misery.
Posted by john zande | July 3, 2017, 10:27 AMThere are too many things here for me to adequately respond. I’ll reiterate two points and address another. First, the second law of thermodynamics is true. The universe as a whole is trending towards entropy. Not sure why this would be in dispute, but if my interlocutors are reduced to denying scientific laws to make their points, I’m not unhappy. This point stands, in my opinion, and basically deals with 90% of the objection.
Simply saying “evil is not privation of good” does not make it so. That’s merely asserting the opposite of a position I pointed out. Asserting the opposite is not to make an argument for your own point. So that point, which is also fairly important, was just dismissed by you without argument.
The point I’d like to address is the weirdness about newborns. First, even if what you’re saying is even remotely accurate, you seem to be utterly ignoring the Christian doctrine of sin and/or the noetic effects of the fall/sin. That’s a broad topic, but given that you’re trying to argue for the incoherence of Christianity, it’s a very important one. It’s not like Christians (at least none I know) are walking around saying “everything is the best, everything is good, nothing is bad.” Yes, goodness is seen as an argument in favor of theism; but no, theists generally do not believe everything is good. It’s an important distinction which seems to be missed in your comments.
Now, I have two children, and I know that the cry of a newborn is in fact a good thing, and a physiological response to their first intakes of air outside of the womb. To read some kind of nefarious, horror movie plot onto this is a bit strange. I don’t know how else to put it. Going along with that, it’s interesting that your assumptions seem to be what you think govern reality. To whit, “if entering this existence was something to be deeply pleased about then maternity wards across the planet would reverberate with the elated sounds of spontaneous and uninhibited delight.” Would they, now? Why? Are infants physically capable of elated sounds of spontaneous and uninhibited delight? It takes them weeks to learn to smile–because they have to observe it and react to it.
So all of these comments about newborns are quite strange and they perhaps betray a lack of understanding about the physical capacities of newborns. They also crucially ignore a central part of Christian doctrine- sin and its impact on the world.
But again, these latter points are much less important than what I pointed out the first go-round: the universe is in fact suffering entropy. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. Do you deny this? If yes, great, I think I can write you off as someone who will ignore physical laws for the sake of maintaining their skepticism. If no, then the whole argument you’re making seems a bit misguided.
Posted by J.W. Wartick | July 7, 2017, 8:29 PMEntropy is not in dispute. You seem to be suggesting that all systems are closed. They are not. Energy is fed into systems, flowing in and through and out of everything, always, and systems within systems actively work to tap this and increase their energy gradient. So, just as long as there is sufficient energy entering a system, systems (life, for example) will work against entropy, and as they do, they tumble forward into ever greater complexity.
You eat, yes? You are working against entropy. You are increasing your energy gradient. More broadly, you are aware, aren’t you, that 438,000 watt-hours of free energy per square foot falls on the earth every year.
That is not, however, forever. In some 5 billion years, Sol will have spent all its hydrogen, and so begin it’s slow but certain death spiral. Without that energy, the earth will die, too.
So, just as I have already said, in the larger narrative, yes, ultimately the energy in the universe will not be sufficient to create greater complexity and this timed game will end.
That is not a problem. This artificial world is quite deliberately sealed between the three things an aseitic being could never experience, but could impose on an artificial scape: a beginning, a middle, and an end. That which did not have a beginning was given a beginning, and once begun, a middle and an end was guaranteed. Order imposed consequences on existence, and the regulation of what can happen, when and where and for how long in the sensible world, fathered the first and the greatest of all consequences: death.
With regulated existence came non-existence: obliteration. On was coupled to Off, the line between the two drawn and fixed, and as sweet sentience only recognised itself in the former, the latter, Off, was dressed in all that which sentience despised. The spotlight of existence (the familiar, the self) was to be cherished while the darkness of non-existence (the unknown, non-self) detested, and since the beginning of the age of stars all those things that could rage against annihilation have raged against annihilation.
That is the original passion of this world: The emergency of survival.
Simply saying “evil is not privation of good” does not make it so. That’s merely asserting the opposite of a position I pointed out.
Precisely, demonstrating the flaw in the general (traditional) theistic position that evil is the privation of good. Good and evil describe nothing. What we are ultimately talking about here is suffering, suffering is tangible, it is measurable, and as such, a superior definition of ‘evil’ is the ways and means by which suffering can be delivered and experienced. This is quantifiable, and we can use the same definition to measure good, where good should decrease the ways the means by which suffering can delivered and experienced.
you seem to be utterly ignoring the Christian doctrine of sin and/or the noetic effects of the fall/sin
Of course I’m ignoring it. It’s a failed explanation for this world. I’m not litigating the claims made by any traditional religion.
As stated in my first sentence to you: Have you ever considered that you might have simply mischaracterised the nature of the Creator?
Unlike you, I am not looking for an excuse as to why things are not as they should be had matter been persuaded to behave by a benevolent hand, rather searching for a coherent explanation for why things are as they are in the unignorable presence of a Creator.
A genuine truth does not tolerate excuses. A truth that requires annotation is not a truth, but a fabrication, which is why I drew your attention to Paley’s remarkably astute observation: “Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”
Know the disposition, revealed as it must be through design, through the architecture, through the history of the contrivance, and one may know the designer.
Well, the predominant tendency of the contrivance does not lie. The pattern to complexity, and complexity to greater evil, is historical. It is quantifiable and it is predictable.
With 13.82 billion years of cosmic evolution supporting my proposition, I contend that this world is a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness; a laboratory concealed inside a complexity machine; an evolving nursery where proxies are grown to probe and explore those things an uncreated aseitic being, God, could never directly explore or experience; death, and all the exotic abstractions associated to it.
Historical accuracy aside, this conclusion follows logically. Curiosity is, after all, a stubborn power. Unable to die, powerless to be no more, incapable of even experiencing the thrill of the fear of approaching annihilation, was it not inevitable that an uncreated aseitic being—God—would come, eventually, to focus His impossible powers to contrive artificial environments (entire worlds) inside which profoundly ignorant avatars could be cultivated and grown to explore this extraordinary curiosity; evolving surrogates through whom He, the Creator, could taste the fear He alone could never savour, feel the suffering He alone could never know, and meet every pedigree of oblivion denied to Him by dying vicariously.
Is this no more unreasonable than a man walking to the top of a hill, or traversing a mountain range, or crossing an ocean just to see what was on the other side?
Yes, goodness is seen as an argument in favor of theism; but no, theists generally do not believe everything is good. It’s an important distinction which seems to be missed in your comments.
Please don’t equate the absence of an argument in the comments as the absence of an argument. A need for brevity means some (many) things will not make it into a comment, but if you have any questions, do please raise them, and I’ll be happy to answer anything.
Good appears to exist, yes, I agree. Superficially, the Problem of Good seems to be as valid as the Problem of Evil. Until, that is, we survey 13.82 billion years of cosmic evolution and see that good does not, in fact, exist. Good has never existed, not as something distasteful or hurtful to the Creator, for good is neither a wave of dissent, nor an infection. It is not a rebellion growing inside Creation like some determined cancer. Good is neither a disease nor a corruption, for good is not the equal and opposite of evil. Good is not evil’s privation, that which exists in its absence, but rather an evil unto itself. It is a calibre of evil, a dialect.
In the simplest possible statement: good is evil. From the perspective of the Creator, they are one in the same thing, indistinguishable in that they are both mechanisms working towards ever-greater expressions of suffering.
Granted, on first inspection, such a statement might appear immediately outrageous. A bountiful harvest, fine weather, even a child’s carefree laugh could not possibly be comparable to (inseparable from) famine, category-5 cyclones, or screams of distress. Manifestly, these things are almost certainly diametrically opposed, but it can be demonstrated that this statement is, in fact, true.
For the sake of brevity I’ll give you one example, but I assure you, I can demonstrate this point at will with anything.
Consider the good of climate, astronomical and geological stability. If daylight hours were not predictable, or the ocean tides were massively erratic, or planet-shattering bolide impacts were far more regular, or perhaps the earth’s tectonic plates flowed at meters-per-hour instead of centimetres-per-year then even the simplest and most resilient illustrations of organic life, cyanobacteria, would be harassed and molested to such a degree that large, stable populations would be impossible to maintain. The corollary of this is, of course, that without those voluminous colonies consuming the sulphurous, carbon dioxide-rich protean earthly atmosphere and excreting oxygen, the planet (2.48 billion years ago) would never have been flooded with that sweetest of gases essential for more complex, muscular life to be nudged into being. And if muscles and oxygen-hungry tissue in general were absent from the world then so too would be jaws and teeth and talons and claws and poisons and knives and cluster bombs and lies.
Good, demonstrably, births evil.
Good feeds evil.
Given enough time, good is evil.
Indeed, given enough time to play through, good is seen to be the greater evil for it is a mechanism of amplification; broadening, magnifying and deepening the ecology of suffering there to be experienced by the Creators surrogates.
So all of these comments about newborns are quite strange and they perhaps betray a lack of understanding about the physical capacities of newborns
Broadly speaking, this was a little tongue-in-cheek. My apologies. The point, though, is not lost on a mildly silly presentation of the idea. New life enters an evolving, sickening maelstrom of increasingly concentrated predation, fear, disease, parasitism, thirst, hunger, starvation, sexual frustration, intraspecific aggression, ostracism, neuroses, complex and not-so complex phobias, and doggedly relentless decay.
Posted by john zande | July 8, 2017, 10:20 AMHi J
Did you delete my comment?
Censorship, really?
May I ask, why?
Posted by john zande | July 8, 2017, 1:17 PMWhat comment did I allegedly delete? I don’t just sit around waiting to approve comments all day. Also there is a comment policy here so any comments not adhering to that policy is deleted. To my knowledge none of yours have violated that policy.
Posted by J.W. Wartick | July 8, 2017, 6:23 PM